A robot small enough to squeeze through a 150-millimetre borehole will crawl into abandoned mines and crumbling water pipes to map them without human help. The Prometheus project addresses a practical industrial problem: inspecting underground voids that are too narrow, dangerous, or remote for people or existing machines. In the UK, aging water infrastructure causes leaks, bursts, and contamination, costing providers heavily in fines and repairs. Network Rail also needs to explore old mine workings that run beneath railway tracks, where ground collapse could disrupt services. If successful, the robot will operate fully autonomously beyond visual line of sight, deploying and recovering itself through standard access points. This would allow rapid, routine inspection of confined spaces in mining, water, and offshore industries—replacing costly, risky manual surveys with a repeatable robotic system. The consortium, led by SME Headlight with partners including Thales and three universities, will demonstrate the platform in lab tests and at Network Rail sites. The project is applied engineering, not fundamental science: it builds a working tool for a known, urgent need.
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"The Innovate funded Prometheus project will develop a fully autonomous robot capable of geo-technical surveys in unknown voids for use in the mining, water infrastructure monitoring and offshore industries. This robot will be able to be automatically deployed and recovered through a standard restricted access bore of 150mm diameter, significantly increasing potential use cases over existing systems. Key demonstrations will be carried out during the project in conjunction with Network Rail - to explore and map mine workings that extend under existing rail infrastructure. Further, applications are also within the water industry with aging water infrastructure. This is presenting major issues to societies, in terms of leakages, burst water mains, flooding, contamination, etc. This is resulting in significant costs to infrastructure providers in terms of fines, legal fees, and complex repairs. The system itself will be designed, built and tested by a consortium led by Headlight -- an SME working with leading edge sensor and data processing technologies. Partners include Callen-Lenz, an SME with expertise in airborne robotic systems development and deployment. They will work closely with the Universities of Manchester, Royal Holloway and Bristol to integrate the latest sensors, control and manufacturing techniques into a truly novel and highly capable platform. This will include sensors and adaptive sensing software provided by both Thales and Headlight. The joint requirements of fully autonomous operation beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), combined with deployment through a limited access 150-diameter borehole will be demonstrated both in a university lab environment and at key milestone demonstrations in conjunction with Network Rail. This will be an excellent illustration of robotics, autonomy and AI in extreme environments with widespread application. The final system will demonstrate a step change in autonomous capability, highly flexible operation and deployment, meeting a real and existing industrial need for rapid inspection of areas that are difficult to access and complex to navigate."
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